Top 12 Android Productivity Tools you should know

With more than 20,000 apps, Google’s Android Market doesn’t quite have the cachet or the inventory of Apple’s iPhone App Store, which boasts more than 100,000 applications. But quantity doesn’t always beat quality. The Android Market has some useful apps in many categories, from games to social networking and multimedia.

But when you want to get work done you need productivity apps, including spreadsheets, to-do and task lists and other tools to make your workflow, well, flow a little more smoothly. Here are some best work-oriented Productivity/ Tools suggestions from the Android Market:

Android Productivity Tools

SKITCH free. Evernote’s second app in this list is more for fun, letting you scribble on photos and images to annotate them. It’s very easy to use, and while doodling rude things on friends’ mugshots is the obvious use, there are work applications too.

CATCH free. Early Honeycomb tablet owners were buzzing about this cloud app, and justifiably so. Not a million miles away from Evernote, it’s about scribbling notes, recording voice memos and taking photos, then storing them in the cloud – with a Streams feature particularly useful for collaborative work.

DROPBOX free. An increasingly essential service no matter what device you own, Dropbox gathers your photos, documents and videos – among other files – for access on the go. As on other platforms, the interface is clean and efficient, for speedy use.

STICKY NOTES HD TABLET WIDGET £1.22. You could argue that shoehorning virtual sticky notes onto a digital device is pure nostalgia. You might have a case. Even so, Sticky Notes HD does it well, stacking the virtual Post-Its neatly so you don’t lose your reminders.

SWIFTKEY TABLET X KEYBOARD £3.49. The second soft-keyboard app in this roundup comes from SwiftKey, with its clever prediction algorithm to guess what word you might be typing next. Cleverer still is the way it can learn your most common words by tying into Facebook, Twitter and Gmail.

HD WIDGETS £1.29. Widgets are one of the ways Android obviously differs from iOS, and HD Widgets offers a bunch of examples, from clocks to weather reports. Tablet tweakers will love it.

EVERNOTE free. As with Catch and Dropbox, Evernote’s strength comes when you use it across several devices, not just one tablet. Sync text notes, lists, voice memos and photos across them all, with sharing features built in too.

FILE MANAGER HD free. Another app from the early days of Honeycomb, which offers a simple-yet-slick way to manage files on your tablet, browing by lists or grids. One of those apps that might not be sexy on the surface, but which will be used regularly.

GOOGLE DOCS free. Another of Google’s own apps, this, which aims to provide a neat native way to access Google Docs – including offline – on Android tablets. Again, simplicity and speed is the focus, to make it quick to edit and share documents.

SLIDEIT KEYBOARD £3.79. Android tab owners are spoiled for choice when it comes to alternative on-screen keyboards, so we’ve chosen two of the best here. SlideIT delivers on its promise of speedier typing with finger-tracing rather than tapping.

SPLASHTOP REMOTE DESKTOP HD £4.56. Remote access used to be a corporate thing, but nowadays even consumers are keen on the idea of accessing their main PC or Mac from their tablet. Well, some consumers. SplashTop Remote is one of the best known ways to do it, and one of the friendliest too.

MINDJET FOR ANDROID free. If Evernote and Catch are more about notes, Mindjet is more about richer brainstorming sessions, making good use of the large tablet screen to organise your thoughts and make them understandable for future reference.

QUICKOFFICE PRO HD £12.97. If you’re not ready to move into Google’s cloud, what about this app for creating, editing and sharing Microsoft Office documents? Support for documents, spreadsheets and presentations makes it flexible, and it also plays nice with Evernote and Catch.